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America’s new CIO wants to disrupt government and make it a startup

October 27, 2011

Steven VanRoekel (credit: Phase2 Technology)

Steven VanRoekel, America’s new CIO, wants to overhaul the federal bureaucracy to become more agile in an age of services delivered via mobile apps, and where information is atomized so that it can be mashed up by anyone to provide deeper insights, Talking Points Memoreports.

He launched a new “Future First” initiative Tuesday night at Xerox PARC to establish new principles for how the federal government develops technology projects.

He called on the technologists in the audience to submit their ideas on what those rules should be, and he intends to further crowd-source the project for ideas at CIO.gov. He also wants to break down massive multi-year information technology projects into smaller, more modular projects in hopes of saving the government from getting mired in multi-million dollar failures.

Instead of having to go to an office to fill out piles of paper, or waiting for months in an inscrutable process for permits to build projects for example, VanRoekel wants to build mobile apps and web sites that let citizens and businesses interact with the government remotely.

Previously, he worked at the Federal Communications Commission, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and Microsoft.

Interesting idea, but one that is prone to failure. You cannot take ideas that work in the real world and apply them to politics. It just won’t work. The bureaucrats have spent their entire lives working the system and setting up their own little empires and ruling over them like tin gods. This idea actually makes sense, but the bureaucrats will quash it if for no other reason than to keep their power.